Mantra FAQs

A. Legal

[wp_super_faq show_specific_category=”faq-legal”]

B. WordPress Functionality

[wp_super_faq show_specific_category=”faq-wordpress-functionality”]

C. Theme Functionality

[wp_super_faq show_specific_category=”faq-theme-functionality”]

D. Updates

[wp_super_faq show_specific_category=”faq-updating”]

E. Specific Functionality

[wp_super_faq show_specific_category=”faq-mantra-specific”]

1,163 Comments

  1. Hi there — starting out a new blog. Tried to play around with the template and I’m getting the same two errors any time I try to do anything:

    Warning: Missing argument 2 for wp_kses(), called in /home/********/public_html/wp-content/themes/mantra/admin/mantra-sanitize.php on line 85 and defined in /home/********/public_html/wp-includes/kses.php on line 502

    Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/*********/public_html/wp-includes/kses.php:502) in /home/*******/public_html/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 866

    Note that I have the latest of both WP (3.3.2) and Mantra (1.8.9). Any thoughts?

  2. I know you get it a lot, but this theme is so perfect! I paid $40 for Scylla Pro and am using this instead. I am just wondering if there is a way to make sidebars (and footer widgets) visible on the presentation page.

    -Also is there a way to hide my logo image from the 1st slide?

  3. Hi there,

    I’m having problems getting text to reflow properly around right aligned images. Headers don’t seem to want to flow, and get pushed below the image. I was thinking of using tables to hack it.

    See this page as an example of a broken page:
    http://www.chapinhavlicek.com/therapists/shirley-mudzinski/

    See this page as an example of a page that I hacked with a table:
    http://www.chapinhavlicek.com/therapists/diane-levine/

    Any suggestions?

    Thanks.
    Todd

    1. This behaviour looks like a hiccup 🙂
      Add this code to Mantra’s custom CSS field:
      #content h1, #content h2, #content h3, #content h4, #content h5, #content h6 { clear: none; }
      If it doesn’t work, try with clear: none !important;

  4. HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!
    Updated to 1.8.9 and my site is screwed up…… the middle column is to the left and overlapping the left sidebar.
    WHAT GIVES?????
    Mantra settings weren’t supposed to freak out like so, or so I was told on this site… But they did and now I can’t go back and change them to 1.8.8.

      1. How can I disregard the previous post? It’s full of exclamation and question marks, not to mention capitalized letters.
        Take a deep breath and start typing exactly what happened. Stop acting like the world is coming to an end and express yourself.

        1. Was that really necessary? Some people get really stressed out by technology. If you don’t that’s awesome, but this is a forum where anyone can post any problems they’re having with Mantra. I really don’t see why this is so bothersome to you.. And honestly, don’t you ignore things bigger than someone using capitalization in emails on a daily basis? It’s pretty easy to ignore.

          1. First of all, since we made Mantra, this site and this page I think we will decide what this ‘forum’ is for.

            It’s for people posting the problems they are having with Mantra, and to an extent with WordPress, but that also MAKE SENSE and that give us enough info to work with. ‘Help us help you’ that sort of stuff.

            There is no place for an argument here. This is NOT a forum, this is NOT a place where you post your thoughts or believes, this is NOT a place to try out your keyboard’s special characters. This is just a FAQ page where you post your issues with the theme IN DETAIL. We will do our best to fix them, like we’ve always done.

            Any more comments on the issue will be deleted. Let’s stay on topic people.

        2. There was an UPdate to mantra..from 1.8.8 to 1.8.9. Believe twas you who told me all would be ok unless had special CSS applied, which I don’t. As already had went from 1.8.7 to 1.8.8, I thought all would be ok.
          It wasn’t.
          I upgraded and boom… my middle column of the blog was adjusted to where it overlapped the left sidebar. My posts were on top of the other words, pictures, etc..
          I have great hosting company that I called and they advised me how to go back to the 1.8.8 version.
          Now I get a thing on my Dashboard to upgrade again.
          No way will I do so and no, I won’t leave the mess up for all to see until one of you support people takes a look at it…
          Nor will I update it just so it will mess up again then try to fix it.
          If you guys had phone support, you would have gotten the call instead of my hosting company.
          That’s what happened.

          1. Do you pay the hosting company? Most definitely. Do you pay for Mantra? NO! So you will never call us because of that. You didn’t hire us, we don’t provide any kind of service for you. We just made a theme. Whether you choose to use it or not, upgrade it or not is your problem alone.

            And yes, I did say the settings will be kept from one update to another. And the settings were kept, the ones in the Mantra settings page, just that you stumbled on a bug. That happens with software you see, and there are never 100% guarantees, even with payed software. Bugs will be created and bugs will fixed.

            So if you’re not happy with the theme please don’t hesitate to change it. Nobody’s forcing you to use it.

            Anyway thanks a lot for the info, we’ll do our best to fix the issue.

    2. Starting a comment with “I did this and this and this and then that happened. Then I tried this and that… and didn’t work” instead of “HELP!!!!!!!!!!!” is a lot more useful…

  5. Hi there,
    I’m wondering how to password protect one of my pages. I’ve tested my site with the basic twenty-eleven theme and password works great there…any ideas on how to implement this?

    Great theme!
    P

  6. I’m not sure what happened here but I have 2 installations of mantra – one offline and one online – 2 different websites I’m working on. The offline (local) installation will show a Visual Editor and an HTML Editor when creating pages / posts etc. The online one only shows the HTML Editor.
    In the user settings the tab for disable visual editor is left blank.

    The pages for the online website were mainly imported into Mantra from another wordpress theme which did not have the option for a visual editor.

  7. Hello 🙂 I’ve been using Mantra for several months and have been largely happy with it, but I’m having trouble with one thing I simply cannot figure out. I’m trying to figure out why it will not show the comments for my posts on my home page. If I click into the post, I can see the comments and new comments can be posted. I’ve had my readers tell me they really wish they could comment from the home page, and I’m trying to enable this, and I just can’t find it anywhere.

    Can someone please tell me how to display comments with my posts on the home page? I’ve looked everywhere, and I can’t find anything. Thanks so much in advance!

    1. Hi.
      All the posts can have an “X Comments” button next to the title and by clicking on that you get sent right to the comments list and form on the single-post page.
      But for that to be visible you need to enable the metas bar in the options (and hide any other metas you do not want to display).

      1. Hi Zed –
        Thanks for the reply. With that said, having a button to click for comments is still an inconvenience to my readers, which is what I’m trying to eliminate.

        What I’m trying to do is have the comments show on the home page. Is there not a way to do this?

        While I’m on here: I can’t seem to get several spaces between paragraphs within my posts, either. It works fine within the static pages, but not the blog post page.

        If anyone (Zed or otherwise) can advise me on how to do these two things it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

        1. No, there’s no option to turn on/off comments on blog-list pages (like the homepage). You’ll have to code that in yourself.

          You customized the theme hard enough that I no longer recognise which are pages and which are post-lists 😀
          Could you provide a link to a posts-list (category) page?

  8. I am using Mantra theme for the local museum website with a presentation page slider with 5 jpg (web optimised) photos, however they are not loading … not sure why – I’m just getting a spinning circle indicating they are loading but nothing else. They have been uploaded correctly through wordpress. Any ideas.
    The file size of each file is: 188kb or less.

    Mantra is such a great theme to work with… so much flexibility. I just love it.

  10. I’m new to WordPress & themes. I’d like to use Mantra, but I can’t seem to find a tutorial on how to update the theme options and especially the presentation page. I also can’t seem to find a support forum around here (the ReadMe file led me to believe there would be a forum, not just a comment box under the FAQs or the contact form).

    Any hints on where I can find documentation on this theme?

    1. If you don’t know how to udpate the theme options… you’d better go get yourself another theme.
      We are working on a forum at the moment but i don’t see what the problem is using a comment form. BTW the contact form creates a support ticket.
      And there is no documentation for this (free) theme because it’s all pretty self explanatory. If you can’t understand that then again I suggest another theme.

      1. Wow. Rude and arrogant. I had hoped for a little more professionalism. So, you’re one of those techies with no social skills, right?

        I’ve only been doing WordPress for 3 days. It is no crime for me to ask for documentation, or directions to a support forum. Especially when I’ve seen so many people dropping Mantra because they can’t get the Presentation Page to work properly, and no one else seems capable of answering their questions. (Do a Google search if you don’t believe me).

        If you want to get people to support you financially (which I was going to do, but am starting to change my mind), the least you can do is learn some business communications skills and remember that your business won’t last long without customers.

        1. We make WordPress themes, we can’t give out support to people that just started using WordPress.

          If you’re new to WordPress please look for some WordPress related documentation and learn to use that, don’t just throw yourself head first into themes and expect us to show you the way.

          Trust me I was neither rude nor arrogant. I was being realistic. And what I said still stands. If you don’t know how to update the theme options, find another theme. Nobody’s throwing Mantra at you. There are thousands of themes out there.

  12. Hi!!

    Thanks a lot for this theme! It’s really customizable and I love it 😉

    But…. I would like to change the color of the “background” of all the pages. I can hide it for the Home page and I’d like to change the opacity for the rest of my blog….

    Can you help me?

    (PS: Excuse my english, I’m french and I don’t speak/write very well :s)

    Thanks a lot,

    Sherka

  13. Just to be clear on theme updates… all the changes, texts colors…will be changed if I update, right? Or is it just the CSS extras I’ve added. Need to know and if it’s all, what’s best way to update.
    Thanks!

  14. Hi,

    I really like your theme! Beautiful and easy to configure. My question is related to internationalization. It stll doesn’t work or I am doing something wrong? I translated the .po file and uploaded the new .po and .mo to languages in the theme folder. However still the original words display. Can you please help me?

  15. So, from reading all the comments so far, I guess the presentation page is still in the working, since there are quite a few options still being added. I have tried every way possible to add, or to embed a youtube video to the presentation page and I can’t seem to find any way that it would work.
    Is there a way that I can edit the html or the php code of the presentation page directly somewhere, which would give me some much needed freedom?
    The theme works great otherwise, and it is very well constructed, I was just really excited to use the presentation page, it just has some strong limitations. Please let me know, or when could we be expecting and update to the theme?
    THX

    1. We may implement at a certain point youtube videos but it’s not a priority right now so I wouldn’t hold my breath.

      Implementing a youtube video in a slider, or in the place of a slider and making that customizable is not as easy as it seems.

      The perfect solution to that is just what I see you did on your site.

  16. You detail above how to use an image for the site header. I have inserted an image onto my home page but I would prefer to insert it into the header to the right of the default text heading(s).
    Is there an easy way to do this?

  17. I was hoping to change the opacity of the slider captions but although the css states there should be an option for it, I can’t find it. I thought that maybe adding to the extra css might work but this doesn’t either. I’ve tried adding the following both as part of a child theme css and directly into the misc setting but no joy.

    .nivo-caption {
    opacity:0.7 !important;
    }
    The option that you mention in the css is captionOpacity but I can’t see this setting in any of the function.php files either.

    I’m usually fairly good with troubleshooting but this has left me stumped. Little help would be appreciated thanks.

    2. If you look in themes/mantra/nivo-slider.js, at the end of the file you-ll find
      //Default settings
      $.fn.nivoSlider.defaults = {
      ...
      captionOpacity: 0.8,
      ...
      };
      This is the opacity value nivo slider uses. You can change that to whatever value you want but keep in mind that the file gets replaced on theme updates so you’ll have to redo the change.
      We’ll try to find a way to make these defaults a bit more easily editable…

      1. Thanks. Is this something that can be incorporated into the child theme modifications (I have been using this for other custom css and leaving the Mantra settings box) i.e. if I put my modified version of the file into the child theme will it override the theme version?

        1. I’m not absolutely sure what order the JS’ are loaded in, but if you include that $.fn.nivoSlider.defaults into your child theme header with your customized settings, it should overwrite nivoslider’s defaults…

  18. Beautiful theme!! I love it. Thank you for continuing to develop it.
    My presentation page slider isn’t working… Any thoughts as to what may be causing this?
    Thank you!

    1. Can’t say why as I see you’ve changed the theme quite a lot so you must’ve edited something the wrong way. Either reset the settings to defaults, restart with a fresh version of the theme or look around the files you edited for a mistake or somehting.

      2. It just smacked me across the face. In the “animation time” setting of the Presentation page, I entered ‘1000ms’ as a value instead of ‘1000’… wow. I feel silly.

        Thank you for your time and your beautiful theme!!

  20. Is it possible to make the header image taller, say 1000 x 180? Fairly new to this but I’m imagining that something needs to go into the custom css area. but not sure exactly what. Any help appreciated. – Julie

  21. Just some this theme and looks amazing and a big plus that it’s very customizable!

    One thing i seem to be missing is that i would like the menu to be on top of the header image (so header image will be background for menu).
    I think it can’t be difficult, but couldn’t find the right part while messing with the css .
    So if you would be able to give me a clue…. 🙂

      1. Thanks for the quick reply!
        The moment I make the margin negative the subpages don’t expand anymore while hovering over it. The margin should be put at -27px to get what I want…Any solution for that too?
        (i’ll try to find the right code for the header…maybe lowering that one would solve it)..

        1. Nevermind….I had set the header to be clickable to get back to the main page. Disabling that restored the functionallity.
          Even with clickable header it seemed to work when just pointing below the header image, but not when on the menu(page) item itself. Also clicking the menu item itself didn’t work with clickable header.

  23. Hi there…
    Is there a way to add custom fields meta box to post pages?
    Or is that a WP thing?
    I do have the latest version of WP and was trying to use a simple code plugin but there’s no custom fields box where you add a new post.
    Thanks,
    Brian

  24. Hello,

    Whenever I select the layout to have the sidebar on the right, it pushes all the content down the page. When I select the layout with the sidebar on the left, it’s fine.

    What is causing the layout to shift down with the sidebar on the right?

    Thanks.

  25. Hi,
    Great theme!
    I’d like to have my menu visible on some pages, but not on others. And the header, too, if possible! I tried enclosing the #access { display: none; }
    instruction within conditional tags in the Custom CSS, but it gets rejected and reverts to either showing or hiding the menu on ALL pages. Can you help me?
    Thanks

    1. It would be a bit more complicated than that CSS code. You would need some php code modifications.
      There should be some plugins available for what you need. Try looking for some.

  26. Hi, thanks for your help Kay on my last query, that’s all sorted now 🙂
    However it’s just been pointed out that now my Blog is on a set page rather than the home page the option to comment has disappeared. I’ve looked at it and all things that should be ticked are, so I am not sure why the option to comment is no longer there. Can you help please….again! There’s always one isn’t there? I’m sorry it’s me 😉

      1. Hi. I looked at that but it was unchecked. However I had the style as standard and noticed there were two standard options. So I changed from the option at the bottom as standard to the top of the option list that was also standard and this fixed it. Thank you 🙂

  27. I am putting a test site together for a client. I love this theme. My question is where do you change the title text above & below the slider on the presentation page. I see where you can put the text for the 4 columns, but not for this. Thanks.

  28. Hi Guys.

    Must say, I do love what can be done with this theme.
    One thing though ( – well actually 2); can I have bit of a hint to do the follwoing –
    1. change the page colour (particularly One-Column, no sidebar) to something other than white;
    2. Make page colour ‘nothing’ (ie so the background shows through).

    Thanks peeps!

  29. Thanks for the theme, I think it’s going to work well. Is there any way to have 2-3 wider footer columns instead of all four?

    Also, I’d love to have a columns option in the rich text editor in a future version?